Travel to Chiloé Island

Chiloé exists because of its separation. When retreating glaciers carved the Chacao Channel roughly 10,000 years ago, they created South America’s fifth-largest island and set in motion centuries of cultural isolation that would produce one of the continent’s most distinctive civilizations. The Chono, a nomadic seafaring people, navigated these waters in dalcas (sewn-plank canoes) for millennia, developing the curanto earth-oven cooking tradition still practiced today. The Huilliche followed, cultivating over 286 native potato varieties in the island’s volcanic soils.

When Spanish conquistadors founded Castro in 1567, making it one of Chile’s oldest cities, they found an island already deeply shaped by its relationship with the sea. Jesuit missionaries followed in 1608, launching the Circular Mission system that produced the archipelago’s most visible legacy: more than 150 wooden churches built collaboratively by European priests and indigenous carpenters. Chiloé remained Spain’s last colonial holdout in South America, not joining independent Chile until 1826.